Strange idea in VAX

From: Sridhar the POWERful <vance_at_ikickass.org>
Date: Tue Apr 2 23:27:14 2002

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Carlini, Antonio wrote:

> > Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
> >
> >Ok. I wonder what would happen if I stuck a DWBUA in the BI cage
> of my
> >VAX 7000-650, and added a UNIBUS cabinet, then I were to take a
> Qniverter
> >and add a Qbus framebuffer?
>
> I imagine you'd be carted off to the funny farm :-)
>
> I assume you were not serious but just in case ...
> Your path to the Qbus widgets would be:
> LSB->XMI->BI->UNIBUS->QBUS
> which I suspect is a tad tortuous even for
> the normally well designed DEC stuff.

Actually, I'm serious. 8-) But my original idea was to put a Qniverter in
a PDP-11/70, write some custom software, and use one of the PDP-11 OSes.

> Bus adapters generally only work well
> one bus down. Beyond that you start
> to hit timing issues and other such trivia
> such as locking.

Hmm. That sucks.

> As an aside, surely with a little bit of
> thought you could get TURBOchannel
> and PCI involved in there? How hard
> can it be?

One thing that might be interested is to see if I can find a PCI hose for
it, find source code for the PCI hose driver for a free OS (I'm pretty
sure that there is one out there somewhere), and try to write a VMS driver
for the PCI hose on OpenVMS/VAX? Then I could try to get a PCI
framebuffer working, but then how would I go about attaching a keyboard
and mouse?

Peace... Sridhar
Received on Tue Apr 02 2002 - 23:27:14 BST